• Independent Online Edition > Features
  Dim sum: dish up a dinner with a difference Small and intricate, dim sum may be fiddly to make
  (tags: food totry)

• Upside-Down-Ternet
  the only thing I can say about this is… hi hi hi
  (tags: tech linux funny)
• ISO 27001 Online: Security Management Standard.
  to read
  (tags: tech security)
• NewsForge | Backing up your network with RANCID
  RANCID …will check your network device configurations and back them up if changes have been made. It keeps a history of changes using either Concurrent Version System (CVS) or Subversion
  (tags: tech ops)

• BluetoothDialup - Community Ubuntu Documentation
  This page describes how to configure PPP dialup through a Bluetooth-compatible mobile phone
  (tags: tech linux ubuntu bluetooth)
• iriverter
  iriverter is a cross-platform frontend to mencoder designed to facilitate the conversion of almost any video format to one that is playable on various multimedia players.
  (tags: tech linux mobilemedia)
• Open Source Testing: About
  Opensourcetesting.org aims to boost the profile of open source testing tools within the testing industry, principally by giving users easy access from one central location to the wide range of open source testing tools available.
  (tags: tech linux testing opensource)

• Knock-based commands for your Linux laptop
  For the first time, you can hit your computer and get a meaningful response! Using Linux® and the Hard Drive Active Protection System (HDAPS) kernel drivers, you can access the embedded accelerometers on Lenovo (formerly IBM®) ThinkPads, then process th
  (tags: tech linux ibm)
• Dreamlinux
  (tags: tech linux projects)

• IBM IT Analyst Relations - homepage
  (tags: tech ba)
• visual id icons - data visualization & visual culture - information aesthetics
  looks interesting - gotta read more
  (tags: tech)

i am not much of a cat person, but this clip of talking cats is very funny!

R

• The Plonefather requests a screencast — Sean Kelly
  “Introducing Plone” is a new screencast intended to be one of a series to instruct new users on using Plone.
  (tags: plone ccms)
• Brazil | Linux Journal
  Software can never reach its potential as long as the design is driven primarily or only by self-interest.
  (tags: tech linux)
• How to use Subversion with Eclipse
  Find out how to use Eclipse for projects that use a Subversion repository.
  (tags: tech ccms eclipse tutorial)

with the news the George W. Bush excercised his veto today, story here, this Stem-Cell Cheat Sheet, from wired, fills in the blanks and explains some of the terms used in this hot topic rather well.

R

• MAKE: Blog: Fermenting waste fruit to fuel ethanol
  “In a series of articles Garth Cambray describes a DIY process for brewing fuel tank ready ethanol, a sustainable renewable fuel exciting the interest of sugar producers in Kenya and beyond.”
  (tags: tech green diy make)
• MAKE: Blog: PlayPumps - Kid powered merry-go-round water pumps
  These merry-go-rounds use kid power to pump water in developing countries, so far 700 PlayPumps have been installed in South Africa - “While children have fun spinning on the PlayPump (1), clean water is pumped (2) from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter
  (tags: diy make green)

• Zope.org - Summary of Using Script(Python) vs External Method
  (tags: tech ccms)
• Integrate external content in Plone — plone.org
  (tags: tech ccms)

A friend recently launched a site called sunglasses.ie, some very stylish designer sunglasses for a very decent price

If you are in need of some sunglasses, take a look.

R

• NewsForge | Hardware diagnostics with open source tools
  to burn! and try…
• Human and Computer Vision Lab
  looks nifty - wonder how that software might work with a webcam!
  (tags: tech webcam)

• Linux.com | Review: Virtuozzo for Linux 3.0
  With so many virtualization applications on the market, which one to choose? SWsoft’s Virtuozzo is strong contender
  (tags: tech)
• Network Chemistry - The Wireless Security Experts
  RogueScanner is an open-source vulnerability management tool that is used to gain greater network visibility to enable you to quickly identify and remove rogue wireless devices that may provide a back door to access your critical data and infrastructure.
  (tags: tech security wireless)
• .:: 1,500 Music Videos From the 80’s ::.
  for bill!

• Treehugger: Julie Frost’s ‘Mvura’ Water Purifier Wins Design Award
  A cracking good design - as much as I love the idea of a $100 dollar laptop, perhaps money should be spend on making these kinds of designs a reality, on a mass scale
  (tags: worldstuff)
• Treehugger: China, Mexico, and Others Would Pay More for Green PCs
  And I reckon I would too. Maybe its age, but the more I think of things like these, the more I realise that the computers (and plenty of things related) are plenty harmful, and we should in good conscience, make an effort to try and curb the damage we are
  (tags: worldstuff green)
• The Energy Blog: PetroSun Enters Algae to Biodiesel R&D
  Great read, and promisng results! “Independent studies have demonstrated that algae is capable of producing 30 times more oil per acre than the current crops now utilized for the production of biofuels. Algae biofuel contains no sulfur, is non-toxic an
  (tags: worldstuff green)

• Jorik’s Project Page
  This is a small application that can be fed the output video stream of a webcam, in which it can recognise and decode code-39 barcodes. It is simply a console application that is limited to parsing an input raw ppm stream, outputting the barcodes to the s
  (tags: tech webcam linux)

Bill posted about the problem of switching from windows to Ubuntu. Leaving aside the time constraint, which is not negligeable when you are already a power user in chosen platform, thought I’d reply in some form regarding the options for some of the apps he wonders that Ubuntu covers. These apps are not restricted to Ubuntu, but available to pretty much any *nix platform. So here we go

• w.bloggar == blogtk (which I am using to write this post)
• feeddemon == liferea (personal fav - it has improved greatly of late) available through default install
• freemind == java app, runs everywhere! debs available
• visio (as clumsy as visio is, dia isn’t at the races) == agreed, and sadly no alternative that I am aware of (save having a vm with windows install…)
• word screen split (this is what stops me from using Oo all the time) == as above…
• snagit == very nice app, but it is much easier to work on screen shots on Ubuntu than windows, press the ‘PrtScr’ key, saves screenshot to desktop, fire up the gimp, hey presto (none of pasting bitmap into word doc… shudder)
• tortoisesvn == number of file manager scripts available, for gnome users, previously mentioned here, there is also esvn, and a number of KDE plugins for svn
• pwsafe == linux versions available from download page, and also appears to work fine using wine
• fiddler == ethereal (optional install from ubuntu repositories), and two very useful Firefox extensions, tamperdata and livehttpheaders
• copernic == beagle, now part of Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS
• wireless (I keep hearing about “kernels” and “drivers”)== native support has improved enourmously, (Bill, for the the T42P, no magic required - it just works), wpa on the hand needs some working on with wpasupplicant

On what you get anyway:

• Emacs 21 == snap
• UltraEdit == nope
• Bash == snap (well duh)
• WinSCP == snap (equivalent available via file managers)
• Winamp == xmms and for more superior: amarok!
• WingIDE == snap
• Gaim == snap
• Java (and everything that runs on it) == snap
• Python (and Django, and 4Suite, and…) == snap
• Ruby (and Rails, and there isn’t an and) == snap
• RealVNC == snap (well vino through ubuntu anyway)
• Apache == snap
• MySQL == snap
• IDEA (it’s an IDE dammit) == nope, but heck, see below
• Eclipse (it’s a platform dammit)* == snap…
• …and tons of stuff I don’t have on the top of my head == snap and then some!

For me, any of the apps that I need to run that are specific to windows, I run very happily through a vmware session, granted - a smidgin more RAM would not go astray, but for what it I need Windows apps nowadays, a vmware session of 256Mb ram is plenty. Using a linux based distro as opposed to windows - has plenty of advantages, plenty more. I agree with Bill though, that making the switch can be time consuming, but a suggestion could be to try it all for a chunk of time through a vmware session, somewhat more manageable than an extra machine. Ubuntu has made switching a lot easier than what was previously available, so much stuff “just works”! R